This is the right answer. Collecting, retaining, using, and selling all this crap should simply be illegal. For Google, for Amazon, for Target, for Visa. Any of 'em.
The more pragmatic libertarians ought even be on board with this, since even if they don't care about massive corporations having all this stuff, allowing its collection gives de facto access to it by the government, and you can't effectively opt out even if you take extreme measures like not communicating with anyone except over encrypted comms and not having any kind of cell phone—you are still in pictures others post to social media, for example, or mentioned in others' unencrypted messaging/email conversations, et c. Your only hope is to become a hermit, basically, which is unreasonable.
...and a police force with arrest powers, and corporate compliance offices that follow the letter of the law, and federal investigators that try and parse code...
And once you get big, you can't get any more revenue.
Those will fail on first amendment grounds. I've been saying for years that you won't have privacy without a constitutional amendment/rewrite, but that's looking more and more likely every day.
Well, I suspect that prohibiting data-brokerage basically helps big players like Google, because it eliminates smaller players who don't have access to such large amounts of data. See [1].
On the other hand, prohibiting ad-based monetization schemes lowers the incentive to excessively track users.
Of course, you could say that everything is proportional to the number of users, but I suspect that's not how it works.
This is the right answer. Collecting, retaining, using, and selling all this crap should simply be illegal. For Google, for Amazon, for Target, for Visa. Any of 'em.
The more pragmatic libertarians ought even be on board with this, since even if they don't care about massive corporations having all this stuff, allowing its collection gives de facto access to it by the government, and you can't effectively opt out even if you take extreme measures like not communicating with anyone except over encrypted comms and not having any kind of cell phone—you are still in pictures others post to social media, for example, or mentioned in others' unencrypted messaging/email conversations, et c. Your only hope is to become a hermit, basically, which is unreasonable.